Day 1

5.03: It’s dark, definitely dark. Still, I’ve made it unscathed through the witching hour – which apparently is not an hour at all but runs from midnight to 3am – as well as successfully negotiating devil’s hour -3 ’til 5am. I’m told devil’s hour is known as such because of the high number of people who die between the hours of 3 and 5. Don’t know if anyone’s actually researched this though.

Anyway, from 5am on we’re into an odd sort of limbo hour, and it’s really an hour this time. After 6 is definitely morning, but 5-6 is a sort diurnal halfway-houseshare for insomniacs and part-time writers. The Daily Mirror’s 3am Girls have been asleep for two hours now, so there can’t be that much happening.

Best crack on I suppose.

5.47: A break to observe that words played in the UK Scrabble championship final yesterday included jerrid, zante, yom, zoeal, ptui, pir, vav, and bumbazed. It’s one of life’s everyday tragedies that a man can put down “bumbazed” for 101 points and still lose the match.

6.56: Well that seemed to go ok, though it’s hard to know what you’ve achieved on the first day. In the stark terms of word count, it’s about 1200 (all outline; not real novel yet). The good news is there are characters, and they seem to behave with some measure of consistency and integrity. The bad news is there’s going to be a lot of early mornings before this shows any discernible progress. That and the weather man says it might rain.